Intelligence Squared U.S. Automation Will Crash Democracy

Transcription

1 Intelligence Squared U.S. 1 May 14, 2018 May 2, 2018 Ray Padgett raypadgett@shorefire.com Mark Satlof msatlof@shorefire.com T: Intelligence Squared U.S. Automation Will Crash Democracy For the Motion: Ian Bremmer, Yascha Mounk Against the Motion: Andrew Keen, Alina Polyakova Moderator: John Donvan AUDIENCE RESULTS Before the debate: 25% FOR 49% AGAINST 26% UNDECIDED After the debate: 45% FOR 47% AGAINST 8% UNDECIDED Start Time: (0:00:00) One plus one equals two. That is not debatable -- or at least it should not be. But ponder this. Ponder this equation. A while back, we held a debate on whether automation will so disrupt the future of work that we should all be getting a universal basic income. Then, on another occasion, we had a completely separate debate on a separate topic -- looking at the swing toward populism and authoritarianism in our politics with a debate called Western Democracy Is Threatening Suicide. So that equals two separate topics, two separate debates. Now though we want to see what happens when we add these two ideas together into one resolution because we think that one plus one could add up to something surprisingly insightful and exciting and have the makings of a debate. So, let's have it. Yes or no to this statement: Automation will crash Democracy. I'm John Donvan and I stand between two teams of two experts in this topic who will argue for and against the motion.

2 Intelligence Squared U.S. 2 May 14, :01:06 As always, our debate will go in three rounds and then our audience here at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College in New York City will choose the winner. And as always if all goes well civil discourse will also be a winner. Let's meet first the team arguing for the motion. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ian Bremmer. Ian, welcome back to Intelligence Squared. You are the president and founder of Eurasia Group. That's a leading global political risk research and consulting firm. You are also very recently a bestselling author. Congratulations on that. Your most recent book released just last month is entitled Us Versus Them: The Failure of Globalism. You are also president of GZERO Media. And that produces a video series called puppet regime. And it features puppet versions of you and Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un and so on and so forth. 00:02:03 So, bringing this back to our debate tonight, are the puppets coming for our jobs? Ian Bremmer: Yes. The puppets thus far are actually creating slightly more jobs. They each require at least one hand. Okay. Thank you, Ian Bremmer. And you have as your partner, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Yascha Mounk. Yascha, to you I also say welcome back to Intelligence Squared. You're a lecturer on government at Harvard. You're a senior fellow at New America, director of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Your most recent book is The People versus Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It. It came out last March. Last year the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article whose title was Can Yascha Mounk Save Liberal Democracy? Can you? God, no. Not singlehandedly for sure. I mean, in the book I show why populism is a real danger and why it has these long-term serious drivers from income stagnation to a more multi-ethnic society. 00:03:04

3 Intelligence Squared U.S. 3 May 14, 2018 But I do think that together we can actually stand up for liberal democracy. Okay. A note of optimism from the side arguing for the motion. Again, ladies and gentlemen, the side arguing for the motion. And now let's meet the team arguing against the motion that automation will crash democracy. Please first welcome again back to Intelligence Squared Andrew Keen. Hi, Andrew. You are an internet entrepreneur, the author of four books including How to Fix the Future which came out in February. You have been named one of the 100 most connected men by GQ Magazine. And you are host of Keen On Show. That's the popular TechCrunch chat show where you interview prominent scholars and leaders in tech, entrepreneurs and the like. What has been your favorite interview on your program so far? I think it was when I interviewed Emmanuel Macron just before he was running for president of France. And he had just grown a beard so he looked very cute. 00:04:02 He looks cute did you say? Very cute. Would he have made -- would he have made the GQ 100 Most Connected Men with that beard? I think he would be the GQ Most Connected Man. Okay. Thanks very much. Andrew Keen.

4 Intelligence Squared U.S. 4 May 14, 2018 And your partner, and I want to welcome for the first time to Intelligence Squared please welcome Alina Polyakova. Alina, it is great to have you here. You're a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a professor of European studies at Johns Hopkins. Also, author of The Dark Side of European Integration. That's about the rise of far-right political parties in Western and Eastern Europe. You have a PHD in sociology from Berkley. And earlier in your career you expected to stay in academia as a professor. What inspired you instead to work in policy? Well, I really quickly realized that with all the instability and upheavals in the world, especially with the democratic resurgence that we saw in Ukraine in 2013, I didn't want to be an armchair intellectual anymore and I wanted to do something about it. 00:05:06 You had to get out there, huh? Yeah. It sounds like. Okay. The team arguing against the motion. Thank you. And again, that motion is "Automation will crash democracy." We go in three rounds. We begin now with round one. Those will be opening statements by each debater in turn. They will be six minutes each. And speaking first for the motion, Automation will crash democracy, and Ian you can make your way to your speaking location, Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group and author of Us versus Them: The Failure of Globalism. Ladies and Gentlemen, Ian Bremmer. Ian Bremmer: Thank you very much. Automation will crash democracy. These are profoundly troubled times. I want to tell you two things that describes that and then give you two stories to explain why automation will crash democracy. First the two things. Number one, the United States -- and not just the United States but almost all of the advanced industrial democracies in the world today are more divided than we have ever experienced in our lifetimes. 00:06:10 That should trouble us. I know it does. It is about Brexit. It is about Trump. It is about the elections we've seen in Hungary and Turkey and Italy and even in France and Germany. One in six Americans today say that they would prefer strong military rule to a democracy. And that's

5 Intelligence Squared U.S. 5 May 14, 2018 not because they think democracy doesn't exist. They think the system is rigged against them. Second point. China. For the last 30 years something that the West has truly believed is that as China got wealthier, as they became a middle-income country, they would need to politically reform or they would fail. That's wrong. And what we know today is that they are now a middle-income country. 00:07:00 They are more consolidated politically. They have not politically reformed. Xi Jinping has recently announced himself effectively as president for life. State owned enterprise and state capitalism is stronger than it was before. They are building an alternative model to liberal democracies. So, the two stories. Why is that true? There are a number of reasons, but automation is truly problematic for two reasons. The first. Back in the 1960s Milton Friedman went to China and he saw a big canal being built with thousands and thousands of Chinese workers. And they were all using shovels. They didn't have any heavy machinery. And he couldn't understand why. He asked the Chinese handler "Where are all of the cranes and the bulldozers?" He said, "You don't understand." He said "We do that because we want these people to all have jobs. That's the intention." Friedman said "Oh, I understand. I've got a great idea. Instead of using bulldozers why don't you give them spoons? And see, then you could hire a lot more of them." We all laugh because we say well of course, you know, I mean silly communists. 00:08:03 The capitalists know how to build things. We know how to grow. Turn to 2018 when instead of globalization we have automation where so many more jobs are being displaced if not go away completely and suddenly you realize the Chinese have the one political system in the world that's actually oriented towards insuring the hiring of inefficient labor. In the United States we right now have lower unemployment than at any point in 2000s, 3.9 percent. It feels awesome and yet wages have been flat for the last 40 years. What's it going to feel like in the United States when we hit a recession? Does anyone believe that our political system is really prepared to do for the average worker and make the American dream feel for the average worker what the Chinese dream feels for the Chinese worker today? I don't think so. That's the first story. The second story. Little different story. Twenty-five years ago -- this is a group that probably reads the New Yorker. I get that sense. Right? 00:09:00 You're giving us an evening at IQ Squared. You could be doing something else. You read the New Yorker, right? You remember -- you remember this cartoon? It's a cartoon that had a dog on a computer. And it was sitting next to another dog who apparently was not computer literate. And he said to that dog -- he said, "You know, on the internet no one knows if you're a dog." Right? And that was -- it was beautiful. It was the zeitgeist of the internet. The idea was it was empowering, to people, to little puppies. Right? They could learn everything. It was the

6 Intelligence Squared U.S. 6 May 14, 2018 communications revolution. It's what got us the Arab Spring. People with access to information learned that their governments were corrupt. They didn't want to take it anymore. They communicated with each other. Off they go. It promoted liberal democracy. Now today if you are on the internet and you're a dog -- we know. We know what kind of a dog you are. We know what other dogs you're into. [laughter] We know where you're doing your business, right? We know all of those things. It's not the communications revolution anymore; it's the data revolution. Right? 00:10:05 It's the information revolution. It doesn't empower individuals. It's top-down. Today, automation-driven and AI-driven algorithms are dividing liberal democracies. They're ripping apart the fabric of society. We live in something close to an information dystopia. I would define one as one where we get our information filtered through the world's largest advertising company. No one can tell me that automation is promoting liberal democracy in that way. And yet, in China, if you actually surf for something that's a little bit off-center politically, they don't say, "Here, let's something even more off-center so we can make more money off you." They don't do that. They say, "No. Here's what everyone else is surfing. Why don't you surf that? And if you continue to surf these unusual things, we may not hear from you very much anymore." 00:11:04 What I'm saying is that automation, both in terms of the disruptive effect on employment and in terms of the disruptive effect on how we consume information, unfortunately, is undermining liberal democracy. And so, yes, I am arguing that automation will crash democracy. Thank you for your support. Thank you, Ian Bremmer. And that is our resolution -- Automation Will Crash Democracy. And here to make his opening statement against that resolution, Andrew Keen, Internet entrepreneur and author of "How to Fix the Future." Ladies and gentlemen, Andrew Keen. Well, I did a little bit of homework for this. I read Ian's book -- a bestseller. Congratulations, Ian. You didn't mention mine was a bestseller, John.

7 Intelligence Squared U.S. 7 May 14, 2018 [laughter] Andrew Keen is the author of a New York Times bestseller. 00:12:01 [laughter] Thank you. The bestseller. [laughter] So, Ian was very spirited, as always. We all know him as a television personality, very passionate. But I read his book, and there's some sentence I found in his book that actually reveals what he really thinks. He said, "In 2018, it's too early to know whether the tech revolution will kill more jobs than it creates." Now, I'm from Silicon Valley. And the reality of automation and AI is -- I'm not allowed to swear on this show, but you know what I would say if I could. We have no idea of what's happening. AI is the big new thing in Silicon Valley. Every new tech company is basically an automation or AI company: Apple, Facebook, Google. They're all trying to reinvent themselves as AI companies, as artificial intelligence companies, building their products, their platforms, their services around machine learning. 00:13:05 But nobody knows how this thing is going to work out. Nobody has any idea -- as Ian correctly argues in his bestseller, "Us versus Them" -- that we have no idea in 2018 where we're at. Everyone has different positions. Bill Gates and Elon Musk argue that automation is so powerful, so inevitable, so all-consuming that it will create machines with consciousness. They will be our final invention. They will enslave us. Others argue that we shouldn't concern ourselves at all; that AI is actually rather impractical and that we are exaggerating. To quote, you know, the idea that we're living in these troubling times, of course, is a perpetual theme, a perpetual trope when it comes to readers of the New Yorkers. We pride ourselves on living in troubling times. 00:14:01 That's what gives us our pleasure. [laughter] And I'm afraid to tell you that we aren't. We're not living in any more troubling times than we've ever lived in. We've always created technology that dramatically changes the world, and

8 Intelligence Squared U.S. 8 May 14, 2018 we've always coped as human beings. One of the troubling things I think about what Ian was presenting is he's presenting us as somehow powerless in the face of this new technology, powerless in the face of automation and AI, powerless to shape our own world. What Ian is suggesting is that we don't have agency. And that is, of course, what computers don't have. Ada Lovelace, the 19th century mathematician who invented the very idea of software, famously said that the one thing software can't do is think for itself. It can't have consciousness. It can't have goals. It can't have agency. It's not human. And that is the reality in 2018, in 2038, and in :15:06 The title of this debate is "Automation will kill" -- or will crash -- thank you, Robert -- will crash democracy. We need to define what automation is. We also need to define "will." It's not might. It's not could; it's "will." This is a debate which suggests that automation inevitably will crash democracy. It's as if some sort of computer software program -- that our societies will shut down because of AI. It doesn't take into account human beings. It doesn't take into account us. Automation, as I suggested, is AI -- is this profound revolution in Silicon Valley, but no more profound than the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. We heard this argument before. We've always had pessimistic intellectuals like Ian tell us we live in profoundly troubling times. 00:16:06 In the middle of the 19th century, we had exactly the same kind of whiners, telling us that industrialization -- [laughter] -- would take away everything of value, undermine society, rural society, religion, masculinity, meaning, marriage, blah blah blah. And they were wrong, and they've always been wrong, because the nature of the human condition is to break things and then fix them. We've proved it in the industrial age and we will prove it in the age of automation. As Alina will talk about, there are many, many practical ways in which automation can actually enrich society. So, what exactly is "Democracy?" We know what automation is. Democracy is one of those slippery words. It's kind of like pornography. We know it when we see it, but we can't define it. [laughter] 00:17:00 I would suggest that democracy is this. Democracy is you guys voting. Democracy is thinking for yourselves and having the autonomy and freedom to shape your world, to articulate your interests. The important thing to bear in mind about this debate is that automation and democracy are entirely different things. Automation is bound up in the what might -- one

9 Intelligence Squared U.S. 9 May 14, 2018 might think of as the inevitable law of technological narrative. Well, as has been phrased in Silicon Valley, Moore's law -- M-O-O-R-E's law -- Gordon Moore of Intel. Democracy is what I define in my book, the bestseller, "How to Fix the Future" -- [laughter] -- thank you, John -- Andrew Keen, I'm sorry. Your time is up. Thank you. [laughter] Moore's law. A bestseller. Debating for the motion, Automation will Crash Democracy, Yascha Mounk, senior fellow at New America and author of "The People v. Democracy: Why our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It." 00:18:09 Ladies and gentlemen, Yascha Mounk. Should I start [unintelligible] it's the bestselling -- no, I'm not going to do that. [laughter] I love listening to technologists, don't you? You always learn so much. You learn, for example, that nothing bad has ever happened since I'm glad to hear that. [laughter]

10 Intelligence Squared U.S. 10 May 14, 2018 They also just have a wonderful way of having their cake and eating it too. The last time I was in Silicon Valley and spoke to a bunch of more senior people there, they were telling me how amazing the world is going to be after the rise of technology. One of them said, "Just wait five years." And he pointed out a hotel window at a green field. "We're going to have one machine building a house all on its own, and it's going to happen in five years, I promise." And then you ask, "What is that going to do to the political system? What's that going to do the economy?" "Oh, things will be fine somehow." 00:19:02 Does automation crash democracy? Well, crash is -- you know, it falls to the ground. Many might try and fix it somehow. That's about what Andrew Keen is saying. We're somehow going to fix it once we've crashed it; let's not worry too much about what it's going to look like. Now, let me be clear here about the nature of automation we're talking about, because the argument is always, "Oh, people worry, and they've always worried, and it's going to be the same as it is in the past." When you listen carefully to technologists, what they're saying is that we're facing a new kind of automation. That what we're going to get is the rise of a kind of general intelligence, a machine that can rival at least the human intelligence of an average person. And if that happens it is not just a normal technological shift that, you know, the scribes who used to write out books line by line are substituted by the printing machine or anything like that. It would actually mean that most people can no longer find employment. 00:20:04 I don't know whether that's going to happen but that's what technologists telling me when I'm in San Francisco. And what I wanted to say today is some of the implications that'll follow if that is true, if 50 percent of jobs really do go away, if most people can no longer find employment. And my argument is very simple. Some of the people who have studied where democracy has been established around the world and where it has failed have come up with a very simple model. They've said democracy takes hold when the cost of tolerating democracy for elites is lower than the cost of quashing democracy. What will automation do? It'll systematically increase the cost of tolerating democracy for elites and decrease the costs of quashing democracy. Why is that the case? Well, the biggest cost to elites of democracy is having to share some of the wealth through progressive taxation, through distribution, and so on. 00:21:04 And the more inequality there is in a society the more demand there is for redistribution. Well, as we have the rise of automation as the few people who still have the skills that are really needed can command huge salaries, as a few owners of the means of production, of robots, manage to get more and more of the gains of these technological developments, and as more and more people are out of a job, inequality in our society is going to skyrocket. And over time that'll obviously mean that the losers of these developments are going to demand to get a little

11 Intelligence Squared U.S. 11 May 14, 2018 bit more of a piece of a pie. Demands for redistribution are going to increase and the cost of tolerating democracy will as well. We might be able to deal with that but at the very same time you'll also see the costs of quashing democracy decrease. We've only ever had democracy in the time period from the French Revolution until today when political leaders needed citizen armies, when we could rely on average citizens to stand up to defend the country against enemies abroad and to keep the peace at home. 00:22:17 But you will no longer need that if you have general intelligence because the robots can do that job for you. They can be your security guards. You no longer need to keep the bulk of society happy. You no longer need a middle-class workforce. For the last 150 years capital needed skilled people in the companies. They even needed the cleaner who came by towards the end of a workday to be well compensated enough that you would not be too disruptive and a little friendly to you. Well, if we get general intelligence you no longer need either of those things. You don't need a middle of a range workforce because machines are doing the job. You certainly no longer need a cleaner. So, once you get the incentives aligned in that way, the temptation for elites to say "Why should we share more and more of our wealth? 00:23:07 Why don't we just retreat to our nicely guarded gated communities guarded by robots?" is going to increase more and more. Now I do think that human agency here is possible. I do think that if early enough we respond to all of this with sensible programs of economic redistribution we can actually save democracy. And this is what Andrew Keen is saying. He's saying "You know what? It's fine. We're going to fix it somehow." Well, how is our response to climate change going? How is our response to automation globalization going so far? My fear is that on the right of a political spectrum people will just say "What we have to do to get more jobs is to slash corporate tax and get rid of regulation and somehow the jobs are going to come back up." And what you might get on the left of a political spectrum is a bunch of promises about jobs guarantees and coming up with a bunch of fake jobs which have actually been automated away. 00:24:05 Our ability to respond to this fundamental transformation in the economy if general intelligence does occur is very limited. And that's why it's not foreordained but quite likely that automation on that scale would indeed crash democracy. Thank you, Yascha Mounk. And that is our resolution, Automation will crash democracy. Our final debater in the opening round will speak against the motion. Alina Polyakova is fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of The Dark Side of European Integration. Ladies and gentlemen, Alina Polyakova.

12 Intelligence Squared U.S. 12 May 14, 2018 Thank you, John. And thank you, Yascha, for starting to lay out my argument for me. That was -- that was very kind of you. So, I will give you this much. We are at the brink of the fourth industrial revolution. Some economic restructuring as we've seen in the past and we have periods of technological change is inevitable. 00:25:03 And yes, it's inevitable that some jobs currently performed by humans will be frankly better performed by machines. But what's not inevitable in any way as Yascha says in his book, history is not linear. You know, we thought that we were all heading towards the end of history back in End of History, Fukuyama. And we're not at the end of history, right? So, we always tend to project from our current moment into the future. And frankly that's not how history works. So, the nightmare scenario what we have this deep inequality, the haves and have nots, robots are our overlords and we just tend to them, and this is the reality that, you know, our children and our children's children will face is not inevitable in any way. But how do we avoid the nightmare? Because it is a possibility, right? It is a possibility. Well, we avoid it exactly by not giving in to the fears and anxieties that are very human. 00:26:04 If we turn away from the coming technological revolution, because it is coming at us like all technological revolutions have, democracies will be left in the dark. And we will give the space to authoritarian regimes like Russia and China to lead in this -- in this dimension. But if we resist that fear and we embrace technological change and we face it as a nation, as a people, as governments, as citizens then a new future is indeed possible. And as Ian says in his book, and I quote, history of personal experience shows that people give their best when the best is required of them. And that is indeed true. And that has been true for the -- since the end -- since the beginning of time. So just as we have smartphones and smart-homes we need to think about how do we have smart democracies? 00:27:06 Because democratic systems can be more dynamic and are by design more flexible and adaptable to rapid change. Authoritarian regimes are not. Think about Russia and China, right? These are regimes that suppress dissent, that censor free speech online. These are the actions of very nervous, anxious societies that are fearful of the coming change. This is not what democracies are built on. Democracies are built on openness, plurality, resilience. And guess what? We have a huge comparative advantage here. We have the advantage that only in democracies can citizens mobilize, activate, and push their political leaders to get through the kinds of social policies that will make this difficult and challenging adjustment period much more smoother and much easier.

13 Intelligence Squared U.S. 13 May 14, :28:03 Look back at history. Beginning of 20th century the United States went through a huge technological upheaval, right? And at the same time did we fall down on our knees? No. We survived, and we actually thrived. Right after that time the United States became the top economic power. It wrote the rules of the international order. And we became a much more inclusive universal society over the same time period. So, we have the handbook. We know how to get through the next technological revolution and we can, and we will do it again. And you know what? New technology is actually making it a lot easier, not harder. Think about the Parkland students from Florida just recently. Look at what they were able to achieve in a matter of weeks. This would have taken years in the past. Think about how much more and faster we could have gotten the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement if Facebook and Twitter existed in 1960s. 00:29:04 Probably a lot further. So smart democracies will be those democracies that can combine the mass economic efficiencies and benefits that automation will offer inevitably with economic security for its citizens. And, you know, to be frank a post-automation society sounds pretty good, right? Humans evolved to be complex thinking machines. We did not evolve to hammer the same widget a thousand times, over and over again, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Machines can do that for me. I'm fine with that, right? We will be liberated when we have machines doing these rote manual tasks for us. We will be able to actually fulfill our human potential and creativity, which we all inherently have. And it's not going to be about us versus them, as the title of Ian's book suggests. 00:30:04 It's going to be us and them. It's about intelligence augmentation. So, IA versus artificial intelligence being the enemy -- or AI. Right? And you know, Andrew and I, we're not naive. We're not looking at the world through these rose-colored glasses. We are just people who refuse to give into fear-mongering when we don't actually know what the future holds. We refuse to give into paranoia. We're pragmatic realists, and we can look at the past and see that we have dealt with similar challenges before, and we can do it again. So, refuse with us. Vote no. Thank you. Thank you, Alina Polyakova. And that concludes Round 1 of this Intelligence Squared U.S. debate, where our motion is, "Automation will crash democracy." Now, we move on to Round 2. And in Round 2, the

14 Intelligence Squared U.S. 14 May 14, 2018 debaters address one another directly, and they take questions from me and from you, our live audience here at Hunter College in New York City. 00:31:04 The team arguing for the motion -- Automation Will Crash Democracy -- Ian Bremmer and Yascha Mounk -- have argued that these are profoundly troubled times that we live in, that the current technological revolution is different from those that preceded it, in terms of its threat to the social fabric and to democracy. They say that algorithms are tearing apart our political discourse -- that if automation leads to the end of 50 percent of existing jobs, that will lead to an inequality that will crack democracy down the middle. They also point to the example of China as a frightening example of a society which is succeeding with its -- with the technological changes, while not actually embracing democracy at all. The team arguing against the motion -- Andrew Keen and Alina Polyakova -- take very strong issue with the idea that this time it's different. They say that there have been many, many times that warnings have been sounded about new technologies. 00:32:02 They have a basic optimism and faith in the resilience of American democracy, as it exists now. But they go even further, and they talk about -- they paint a picture of something they call "smart democracy," a time in which there will be more opportunity for individuals to give voice to their political power, and in which we will be liberated by the robots from the kinds of monotonous, repetitive tasks that keep us from being fully human. So, they have a much more positive view of the future. And I want to start by taking just that very positive view to the opponents' -- opposing side, to Ian Bremmer, to start with -- your opponents' basically arguing not just "we've heard it all before" -- which I don't think you're surprised to hear -- but also an argument that there's great promise for democracy and the kinds of changes that come, that we -- our democracy -- our ability to be democratic agents, each one of us, will get greater with technological change. 00:33:02 Can you take on that question? Ian Bremmer: I didn't hear that from them. What I heard was that -- Well, did I mischaracterize you? No. That was correct.

15 Intelligence Squared U.S. 15 May 14, 2018 Ian Bremmer: What I heard -- Okay. Ian Bremmer: -- what I heard was that technology is going to create far more opportunities, all right? And I agree with that. I think globalization has been a very positive thing. I think it's a great system. It's by far the first economic system. Lots of growth, efficient trade, cheaper products - - except that a lot of people are left behind. The problem I have with globalization is not globalization. It's the deficit of the political system in responding to those people who are left behind. What I did not hear from the opposing team is that as automation grows -- not that there's a problem with technology, but no one is giving me any reason to believe that liberal democracies are going to be able to effectively respond politically to all of those people -- the far more that will be left behind. And I said exactly what Andrew quoted; he didn't misquote me, in my book. 00:34:01 I said that we don't know if there are going to be more -- as many jobs or if jobs will be destroyed by automation and AI. But what we do know is that the jobs that are created -- however many they will be -- the people in our societies today are not trained for them. They are not prepared for them. And we also see absolutely nothing in our political system today in the United States, in Europe that is prepared to actually transform them. If we leave this many people behind over the last forty years, when the changes come comparatively incrementally when we have a sense of how many people are going to go and work in factories abroad? Do you think our political system is going to get better when the technologists on the other side say, "We literally have no idea what's going to go ahead -- but the technology will be great. I'm sure the politics will work." We have far too many technologists that are prepared to tell us that the politics will be just fine. Okay. Ian Bremmer: Historically, that's how we get into wars. Alina -- who would like to respond on your side? Alina Polyakova. I can respond.

16 Intelligence Squared U.S. 16 May 14, :35:00 I didn't have a chance to fit this into my six minutes. But you know, we did respond from a policy perspective -- at the turn of the century that I mentioned, during the great upheaval in the United States. What did the U.S. government do? The U.S. government is actually the first to introduce mass public education [inaudible] -- Do you mean the turn of the 19th to the 20th century? Correct. Okay. Just want to be clear. Yeah. Sorry about that. Okay. Not the recent century. And the United States was also the first government to lay a path for post-secondary education by establishing state universities. And all these welfare states in Europe that are now paying for their expansive social programs and free education actually learn from us. So, we can do that again. But it will take good social policy. So, you talked about these people -- they'll be left behind because they don't have the skills, right? There are already private-public initiatives that are happening between Facebook, and LinkedIn -- and Andrew can talk about that. He's from Silicon Valley -- that are trying to re-train people, give them the kinds of digital skills they will need in this new digitized economy. 00:36:04 This is happening in the local level, at the state level, and it will happen at the federal level as people start to push for more and more funding and resources of these kind of programs, just like we did 100 years ago. We will do it again. Yascha Mounk, are you persuaded? I'm just so touched and moved by the [unintelligible] political system. I want to read whatever newspaper you're reading, because when I look at the news, I don't have that much trust --

17 Intelligence Squared U.S. 17 May 14, 2018 Breitbart. [inaudible] -- to respond rationally to changes -- [laughter] -- in what's going on. The -- I've heard two main lines from the other side. The first is a line that Alina said. We have a handbook for how to deal with all of this. No, we don't, because the kind of automation that technologists are talking up in Silicon Valley is going to be profoundly different from what we've seen before. It's not just one particular kind of routinized activity being substituted by robots, and there's all kinds other routinized activities that could still be done by humans. 00:37:00 It is intelligent machines learning to adapt on the fly to all kinds of different tasks. And that puts us into a completely new situation, and no, we don't have the handbook to deal with that. And the other line I'm going to keep hearing over and over again from the other side is, you know, this time isn't any different from the past. Let's assume that that's true for the moment - - and think of all of the deep political upheaval that we've seen over the last 200 years, as we've had moments of automation. Think of the luddites. Think of the deep economic crisis of the late 1920s and the horrible wars that that led to. I don't think that this time isn't going to be different. I think it might well be different. But even if they're right, that it's just going to be just the same, we will be in for a world of hurt and for a world of chaos, and in a very different changed world in which China is stronger, in which authoritarian regimes are stronger, in which already our political systems are less functional. We just cannot assume that we are going to be able to deal with that in a rational way. Andrew Keen. So, our friends on the other side keep on using this word "profoundly." 00:38:05 According to Yascha, we're living in profoundly different times. Ian says it's profoundly troubling times. I think they're profoundly wrong.

18 Intelligence Squared U.S. 18 May 14, 2018 [laughter] The reality is, is that -- well, let me make two points. Firstly, Ian's point that we're living in profoundly troubling times -- he kept on mentioning China and he kept on mentioning the collapse of democracy around the world in Turkey, and Poland, and Hungary, and Russia. He's absolutely right about that. I might even use "profoundly troubling" in those sense. It's got nothing to do with automation. I haven't seen a lot of AI in Putin's Russia, unless he's using it to undermine our system, using it with bots. I haven't seen a lot of automation in Poland, or Hungary, or Turkey. So, the problem with the crisis of democracy in the early part of the 21st century is an atavistic longing for community, a fetishization of territory and blood, which has absolutely nothing to do with AI, nothing at all. 00:39:08 The -- and the China thing is a distraction as well, because China isn't a democracy. So, whether or not China does well as a non-democracy has nothing to do with this issue of automation-d crashing democracy. Let me also take up Ian's point. I just wrote a book. Seriously, I wrote a book about how we are indeed responding. There is a movement around the world, for example which I know Alina has looked at very carefully, guaranteed minimum income. We acknowledge that people will lose their jobs. So, what are we going to do? We're going to guarantee them an amount of money, so they can survive, so that they won't trash democracy. And these are initiatives in Switzerland, in Finland, in Brazil, all around the world. Ian Bremmer: One of them has just been abolished by the way. One in Switzerland was voted down. The one in Switzerland was voted down. 00:40:01 But I interviewed for my book the person who began it. And in Zurich a majority voted in favor. And he considered it a success because it began the conversation. Just as in the middle of the 19th century the first initiative to stop 11-year-olds working in factories or allowing people to unionize those were put down. It takes time. We -- our problem is our impatience. We expect there to be an app to fix the future. It takes time. Let me move this to a slightly different place. Yascha, in your opening statement you laid out a sort of dynamic in which you said that democracy will be crashed because it will come to the point where for the elites it would become -- it will become more costly to accommodate democracy than to try to quash it. And so that's a sort of 30,000-foot explanation of an overall principle but I want to just ask you to bring this down to the very practical level, or Ian as well,

19 Intelligence Squared U.S. 19 May 14, 2018 of an individual who loses his job, loses his or her future. Let's say college educated. Or -- and let's put together a collection of individuals. 00:41:02 Blue collar, white collar in a neighborhood or in a state or in a city. They are among the losers. What are you telling me they're going to do politically that cracks democracy? What choices are they going to be making are you talking about? Well the first one is interesting but you're just thinking about a guy who lost his job. He might be a danger to democracy but so might the person who actually now owns an army of robots. So, I think that there's two different ways in which democracy might come under pressure. The first is that there's going to be enclaves of very rich people who actually own all of the productive material in society which is the machines and robots and so on being asked to give up more and more money in order to finance that nice universal basic income scheme that Andrew is talking about. And at some point, they're going to think "Why? I don't have anything from these people." So -- They're not actually helping me. So, what the quote unquote masses would be doing would be voting or demanding politically a larger share of the pie. They would be looking -- Yes. -- for greater redistribution. But that's in a best-case scenario. In the worst case scenario, we get what we've seen around the world. 00:42:00 To say that the rise of populism has nothing to do with the fact that incomes in United States and other countries have stagnated for many decades is deeply naïve. One of the reasons why people have turned back to nationalism, have turned back to these authoritarian forces, is that

20 Intelligence Squared U.S. 20 May 14, 2018 they no longer believe that our political system is working very well. And they're very willing to go with somebody like our current president who says "Just trust me. I alone am going to fix it. All of this system is corrupt and inefficient. I really speak for the people. Give me a little bit more power and everything is going to turn out for the best." The idea that all people want is a little bit of income and if the state gives them some money every month we're going to be happy which is the idea of universalized income that Andrew Keen is talking about is deeply naïve. We live in a society in which for centuries and millennia people's self-worth has come from having a job and gaining status from that. I want to get into that -- And think that we can just substitute that by giving people a little bit of money every month is quite naïve. 00:43:00 Before we go deeper into the universal basic income I just want to see if Ian Bremmer if you -- if you can also flesh out this picture of what the average -- let's say, you know, we're still in the phase when the apparatus of democracy to the degree that it's a voting system in addition to all the other aspects of liberal democracy is still functioning. What do you see them doing? What would the presidential campaign be? What would those folks be doing? Ian Bremmer: I would want to challenge the notion that still functioning is a question of whether or not there's a revolution and creates an authoritarian regime. One of my favorite quotes which I put in the book is from William Gibson. And it's about -- says the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. Our history is littered with incidents of people not being necessary, not being empowered, and as a consequence being left behind in functioning democracies. We see it today in Israel. One of the most effective and advanced industrial democracies not just in the Middle East, in the entire world. They don't need the Palestinians anymore. Don't need their labor. 00:44:01 Have the ability to wall them off. And you know what? Israel's an awesome democracy as long as you don't count the Palestinians? Now is that a functioning democracy or is that a crashing democracy? Because in the -- one of the reasons I am concerned about universal basic income -- Andrew's right. I think that eventually if we don't have jobs for people we'll do more experiments of UBI that won't be voted down like Switzerland. The Finns just said after one year, we don't want to pay for it anymore. Eventually they'll do it. They'll do it like the Saudis did. You know what happens when -- when you give people money and you feel like you don't

21 Intelligence Squared U.S. 21 May 14, 2018 need them anymore. They're no longer -- you've taken care of your responsibility. You start treating them a little differently. You start treating them less like people. I don't consider that a functional democracy. Let me bring in Alina Polyakova. So, two points in response to that. One, I just want to point out that Yascha's using a very old Marxist argument here. Marx was writing in the 1800s. And his basic thesis was, you know, as modern capitalism advances, you know, the higher ups, the owners of the means of production own all the capital and then everybody else is going to become a worker and the conditions are going to be worse and worse and worse. 00:45:08 And eventually we were going to have this beautiful communist revolution where the workers are so angry they're going to, you know, push out the capitalists or the capitalists try to suppress them. And, you know, that didn't work out so well, right? And here we are. And it's 200 years later. None of those predictions have come to pass. So, I just want to point that out to you, Yascha, you're still living in a -- in an old world. I agree. There's an alternative scenario which is that the robots become conscious and start coming down on us instead. So, it's -- you know, you might -- you might be right. Well, that takes me to my next point. I think before we even get to the conversation about universal income or other programs to try to make the adjustment, the economic restructuring, easier there's an underlying assumption that is inherently false here which is that automation will lead to mass unemployment. And that is not correct. Because we can all say, you know, the prediction is that millions of jobs worldwide, 400 million, 800 million, are going to be lost to automation. 00:46:07 But how many more will be created? We have no idea actually. And in fact, if we look at every technological revolution we saw far more jobs created or people transitioning into a different industry versus just mass unemployment. You know what? Modern democracies in the West are dying out. And in fact, what we're likely to face in the next 20, 25 years -- it's not going to happen in five years -- is we're not going to have enough people to fill those jobs. And that's already happening. Look at the unemployment rate in the United States. Look at some of the small businesses in places that agricultural like Idaho, Ohio. They're actually complaining because they can't find workers. Right?

22 Intelligence Squared U.S. 22 May 14, 2018 Let me -- This is the new reality. Andrew Keen wants -- your partner wants to join. Yeah. Can you yield the floor? Thanks. Yeah. I want to reiterate what Alina is saying. The reality of the AI revolution, it will create new scarcities. 00:47:02 Machines can't develop empathy. Machines aren't creative. Machines can't think for themselves. Though actually could conceivable, not inevitably, because that's the problematic word in this conversation. But this revolution could potentially enable a second or third renaissance. It's just as likely, not inevitable but possible. But I want to come back to something that Yascha is saying because he's falling into the very trap that I warned you about. He's presenting technology and monopolies as inevitable. He's talking about winner take all technology companies. They're going to control everything. They're going to compound inequality. What Yascha is forgetting is politics. He's forgetting democracy. Look what's going on in Europe. Margrethe Vestager, the EU Commissioner of Antitrust, is fighting Apple, fighting Google, fighting Facebook. The -- Who do you think will win? Who do you think will win? 00:48:00 She just fined Apple $12 billion. Google is now under three antitrust investigations. Now the problem in America is that the political system is paralyzed, but that's got nothing to do with this bigger issue. Ian is suggesting -- sorry, Yascha is suggesting we essentially lie back and think

23 Intelligence Squared U.S. 23 May 14, 2018 of Silicon Valley and just assume it's inevitable and there's nothing we can do. We can do stuff as consumers, as entrepreneurs, as citizens. And politics is the answer, it's not the problem. But these guys present politics as the problem. It's the solution. It always has been, and it always will be. Let's let Ian Bremmer respond to that point. Ian Bremmer: I certainly would not suggest we lie back and allow Silicon Valley they're going to win because it's not necessarily Silicon Valley. Right now, it's either Silicon Valley or it's China. Those are the drivers of automation. 00:49:00 When you asked who's going to win in Europe it's not going to be the Europeans. I don't know if it'll be Silicon Valley or the Chinese. That's a really interesting question. But let's keep in mind that in China AI is driven by the state, the political system. In the United States it is not. It's driven by corporations. In other words, at no point are the political systems, the liberal democracies, actually driving AI. That's a problem. They don't understand it. In the United States we wouldn't know how to regulate. Did you see Mark Zuckerberg trying to explain to senators what a Facebook was? Did you guys see that? Right? Do not count on these people to be effective arbiters and umpires. But there's -- [laughter] -- one -- okay. I yield my time to applause, but there's one other point I wanted to make -- [laughter] -- which is no one -- everyone keeps talking about the automation point of jobs. No one else has picked up on the point of what automation, AI, is doing to information consumption. 00:50:00 And we all have one of these. Maybe there's one 95-year-old person in the back that doesn't. The rest of us do. We spend way too much time on them. We're doing an incredible social experiment right now, giving all of our kids -- we're saying, "Here, use these to connect with absolutely everybody. Let's see what happens in 20 years." Within five, it's going to be virtual, right? It's going to be augmented reality. It's going to be completely immersive. And those -- United States control those filters -- by corporations that want to make money. In China, controlled by the government. Again, automation and AI crashing liberal democracy. And I